ECHOES ON THE SECOND FLOOR

 

2 July 2025, Paris 

Lately, my dates always begin or end with rain. This one arrived dressed in overcast light, the kind that brushes everything with a hush. It was the second of July in Paris, and the sky had just finished raining in the early hours, leaving behind a softness that clung to windows, steps, and thoughts. I wandered into the Centre Pompidou just as the wind lifted slightly, as if something unseen had stirred. 

The old BPI library, once dense with books and whispers, now stood emptied, not abandoned, but expectant. I hadn't planned to feel sentimental about industrial carpet, but there it was: faded marks where shelves once stood, an unintentional grid of ghosts. It suited the occasion. 

Wolfgang Tillmans had taken over the entire second level for his retrospective, "Nothing Could Have Prepared Us, Everything Could Have Prepared Us". It didn’t feel like an exhibition. It felt like someone had broken open their own archive and invited me to walk barefoot through the aftershock. 

There were no clear paths, no forced chronology. Photographs were taped to walls, laid flat on tables, and paused mid-thought on giant prints. Some shimmered with a club's pulse, others with domestic quiet. One moment, I was looking at skin, impossibly close, damp with motion. Next, I was face to face with a storm cloud that looked like it might swallow the entire city of Lagos. These images didn’t explain themselves. They simply were, like light or hunger. 

In a small room where the carpet still bore traces of the old library layout, a sound installation murmured. It was the closest I’ve ever come to hearing memory. Not nostalgia, but something else, a re-sensing of the world as it was, or might have been. 

I lingered longer than planned. I had the vague sense I was being watched, not by people, but by the atmosphere itself. A curtain swayed, though no one had passed. A breeze where there should be none. It could have been the air conditioning. Or it could have been Tillmans, laughing. 

When I stepped out, the rain had not returned, but the streets still held their signature, a glisten, a hush, a kind of kindness that follows after. 

I had taken photographs, not to explain, but to remember how the light folded, how silence rearranged the air. Later that night, I wrote one line: "A photograph doesn’t end, it opens." The rest, I left for the morning.

p.s. The exhibition will run till 22 September 2025. After that, Centre Pompidou will close for five years due to renovations.